


Revival

by The_Dancing_Walrus



Series: Not Quite Khalsa [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Augments, F/M, Fem!Khan, Female Character of Color, OC, POV Female Character, Race, Spoilers, What about the rest of the crew?, greenland, star ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-15
Updated: 2013-06-15
Packaged: 2017-12-15 01:32:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/843759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Dancing_Walrus/pseuds/The_Dancing_Walrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Khan and the remaining free Augments attempt to recover the rest of their crew from stasis and escape into the most hostile environment known to man. </p><p>The Final Frontier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revival

**Author's Note:**

> I don't speak Punjabi, Sanskrit, Hindi or Arabic and so there may be mistakes in the way I've used some terms.
> 
> Translations now at the end.

The future was an entirely unexpected mix of the extraordinary, the mundane and the outright depressing. 

There were aliens, sentient non-human (if mostly humanoid) extraterrestrials. And they were, are, a revelation to her, beautiful, fascinating, completely wonderfully new. 

A rapidly developed tendency to grin like a loon at every alien she saw led most individuals around her to believe she was either the most ignorant country girl who ever breathed or mentally defective. Which probably leant more towards mundane than depressing, people it seemed never changed-

There was the technology, a new language to pick up from news feeds and centuries of scientific theory to sift out of online educational material and revision tools.

There was, still, an adjusted and renamed version of Wikipedia, another small piece of evidence that some things remained static. 

There was the wide expanse of sky, now opened up to travel and exploration in a way previously only dreamt of. An endless ocean of stars to dive into for pearls. 

And the ships. The ships were magnificent. 

Then there were the….disheartening facts. Which were wide ranging, varied and worried at her soul, preventing her from truly enjoying this new shining hopeful world. 

Sixty nine of her people are imprisoned. And this she could solve, would solve, with time and patience-

There was the way her pati, her husband, was being thoroughly denounced everywhere he was mentioned. Which was almost like the Earth she knew-

There were the changes in Dehli, in Mumbai, in Islamabad and Kabul, vast sections carved away by time that made her want to weep. 

As far as she knew she was now the only living (correction the only awake) person who still knew loh mushti. 

She would have to take students. 

And there were, on certain streets, people who still wore the kara and the kesh as proudly as she. 

Then, of course, Captain Kirk captured Layla. She was planning, at some point in the near future, to have strong words with her pati on the subject of making tenacious enemies.

After that it became necessary to…hurry.

They would have to flee again, soon, into the stars. The world that made them did not want them, it’s youngest children, it’s changed children and hadn’t Rushdie once observed that children were the vessels into which adults poured their poison?

When the first trembling group of Layla’s children arrived on Joachim’s doorstep he broke their safe, sensible silence to tell her. To clasp his hands in his hair and ask her what by God Layla had been thinking, nineteen, nineteen!

Layla, she assumed, had been thinking the same thing Layla was usually thinking. Of the gap in her body where a womb should be. Of the prospect of their kind lasting a mere two generations (however spread out) before being declared extinct. Of the lack of justice the world displayed by allowing children to come to those who would abuse them while it left her sterile and alone. 

She had smiled and assured Joachim that any man gifted with his imagination, adaptability and ability with a violin should be able to handle a mere nineteen children.

Joachim assured her that she was missing the point. 

They had not discussed matters of actual importance that way and she was relatively confident that he had had the sense to move on to another city as soon as she hung up. 

She heard from Aberash a week and a half later. 

And then, after three years absence, she was going to see two of her closest friends, her most loyal allies. 

Perhaps that should have been overshadowed by three years of training, planning, preparation, by how close they were to taking to the sky again.

But it was Aberash and Joachim. 

And perhaps it was not proper for the leader of a species (even if they were few) to pull her comrade into a hug that swept her off the ground, to squeeze her close and laugh and cry and call her sister.

Propriety was for girls who wished to keep purdah. 

Joachim requested that she greet him in a way that allowed him to keep his feet on the ground and all his ribs intact and she may have said some less than complimentary things concerning his character as a result. He smiled and they embraced, briefly. 

Their meeting degenerated somewhat with introductions to Layla’s brood. They were- well they were nineteen children of varied ages, races, pasts. It was, if not impossible, at least unwise to generalise. They brought their population up to ninety two and so they gave some small measure of hope, but they were so young, so vulnerable, their future, their safety, their freedom entirely reliant on her.

It was a particularly unpleasant thought even if it was not an original one. They had all been dependant on her for their survival the last time her people had taken to the sky. 

She pushed such thoughts aside. They were as ready as they would ever be. They were, between them, the most competent individuals on the planet and they understood absolutely what they might lose. They would succeed because they had no other choice. 

They discussed the matter of ships, dismissing several potential targets as too damaged, too close to populated areas or too large to adequately crew. Joachim suggested the Reliant docked at Puducherry but withdrew the idea based on Aberash’s information on the state of its warp drive. 

They settled on a small dock outside Harar that was due to close in a few months. It had mostly serviced small scouting vessels and shuttles but for the past three months a single Miranda class ship had been under its tender care. 

“It’s called,” Joachim said with a small wiry smirk. “The Botany Bay.” 

“We shall have to rename it.” Aberash replied. 

She smiled to herself at that, because some things, some people, did not change. 

This agreed they turned to the technical details, to time zones, coordinates, power lines and explosive charges. They have amassed quite an arsenal between the three of them and perhaps, if they’d wished it, they could have left sooner, tearing a bloody trail across the Earth before abandoning it once more. It was, she suspected, what the Federation would expect from them after her pati drove the Vengeance into San Francisco. 

It was almost amusing, how poorly they knew her-

And then, so quickly, their course of action was decided, the last details confirmed-

And they had to go their separate ways, to fail and die or succeed and meet again in orbit-

God it may have been weak but she did not want to leave them again not knowing if it would be for the last time.

Still they rose as one. Joachim pulled her close and murmured softly that he would see her soon aboard the Botany Bay. 

She was not sure if he said it to convince her or himself.

Aberash did not offer such false comfort. But Aberash did take her hands and squeeze them and they both longed for Layla’s laughter to break the tension. 

“Good luck.” Aberash said finally.

She bit down on the urge to give a glib response and instead wished them all luck in return. Then she drew herself up and forced herself to turn and walk away. Leaving them, Joachim, Aberash and those rare, beautiful children was far harder than leaving the planet had been.

-

The base wasn’t what she would have chosen but she could nonetheless appreciate it. Almost 550 miles from the nearest human settlement of any size and permanency, separated from civilisation by artic ice and ocean. Any escapees would have a walk of two or three weeks in front of them, in sub-zero temperatures at most times of the year-

They wouldn’t need guards or walls to keep her people here, they’d just need to deprive them of their shoes and let ice and hunger do the rest for anyone too stubborn to surrender.

It was mid-April, the evening thankfully clear and a positively balmy minus 10. She drove the boat into the ground three miles out from the base and cut the engine. As soon as she’d hopped ashore she kicked it back into the ocean and let it drift. She had everything she needed and a beached boat could lead to the alarm being raised while a drifting one was more likely to result in a rescue attempt. 

She thought of the weathered woman she’d rented it from on the Canadian side of the sea and felt a small stab of guilt. She had tried to persuade her to sell-

She took a deep breath of stingingly cold air and put it out of her mind. She checked her watch and began the trek northwards.

In an hour she’d reached the first power line and had set the first charge to boil its way down through the ice. A few degrees west and another hour saw her set two more. 

She circled eastwards to approach the base from the shore. It was dark enough by then to see the lights and use them as a guide. Or to measure the efficiency of her charges by how many of them disappeared on schedule.

And the efficiency of their back up generators by how many of them blinked back in the nineteen seconds it took for them to kick in. 

She waited patiently for the commotion to give way to order, her kara burning with the cold against her wrist. It might have been wiser to wrap it but this way the cold served to remind her of it. 

Of deeds righteous and true-

She was here to release her crew, not punish their captors. It would be best to keep that in mind given the state they might be in. 

When the occupants of the base seemed to have given up sprinting from one looming concrete monstrosity to another she moved. 

There were patrols and there were guard towers at regular intervals along the chain link perimeter, but the light was patchy and the base large. She found a section that was still dark, slit the chain and slipped inside.

And now….now it would become interesting. 

She set off north-west at a brisk pace in part because pausing, even for a moment, would appear suspect. And in part because she truly had no idea how long it would take for them to consider the power cut sabotage and remove her crew. 

She stayed in the shadows to begin with, weaving in and out of the smaller buildings on the periphery then darting across the runway unchallenged.

Which was more luck than she felt she deserved. 

They had not precisely obtained plans for the base but satellite images showed all the buildings and the runway clearly. An adequate knowledge of the area’s geology and ample experience laying sewage and power lines made it clear where they were likely to be. And the newly installed shielding array around one particular warehouse made it obvious where she could find her crew. 

They had chosen well, she would freely admit that. She could see how easily her people could be removed by air, how any escapees would be funnelled by the base’s design away from the barracks and out towards the ice-

An enlisted man barrelled round the corner and had the time to give her a baffled expression before she stunned him. 

The sound of phaser fire alerted the personnel guarding her crew and it was only natural that they would come out to assist their fellows. Which saved her the trouble of breaking their security measures. 

The door slid open and she drove her shoulder into the first guard’s solar plexus with enough force to send him flying. 

Of course charging through in such a conventional fashion registered with the scanners on the door and activated the alarm. The lights flared red, the speakers made a horrendous noise and the lock-down procedure appeared to be functioning despite the power outage. She didn’t actually bother to watch the thick metal doors slam home she was too busy stunning the ensign in commands yellow. 

Their reaction times were slow which she found oddly offensive. Yes they were only human and yes it was quite late and they had been caught off guard but it seemed somehow perverse that her people could be held hostage by such-

She caught a glimpse of the frostbite round her wrist, blue-black not warm enough to have healed completely and it brought her back to herself. Such rage, krodh, was a foe to be vanquished and eradicated-

In the time it took for her to become angry at their sloppiness, recognise her wrath and push it back she had stunned six of them. Four red, one yellow, one blue-

She strode across to that first unfortunate guard who was struggling clumsily to his feet and shot him once. He crumbled, twitched and was still. Which left one in blue, a scientist-

“Oh God-”

She wasn’t sure if he was trying to pray or curse. He had backed himself into a corner and was staring at her, utterly terrified. She took a moment to pause, to breath, to count the pods-

Sixty nine, thank God, there were still sixty nine.

The scientist was babbling something semi-hysterical, trying to beg perhaps? She ignored it, checked her watch, twenty eight minutes-

If all was well then Aberash and Joachim would be inside that dockyard in Harar, nineteen children would be waiting in the plains twenty miles south of the city. If not-

That was perhaps not the most productive line of thought. She holstered the phaser and turned her attention to the scientist.

“They are stunned, not dead.” She informed him, with slightly less tact than compassion demanded. “I will not kill you and I do not intend to hurt you but I will stun you if I have to. Do you understand?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, swallowed and finally gave up on speech and nodded.

“What is your name?”

“Garcia,” He replied in a voice much steadier than his shaking hands might have suggested. “Doctor David Garcia.”

She inclined her head. “I am Khan Noonien Kaur.”

Her name was apparently known to the doctor because he turned a quite unhealthy shade.

“You are a medical doctor?” She enquired.

“I-Yes-”

“You were checking my crew?”

“Yes.” He confirmed.

She considered this for a moment. The man was clearly in the scientific section of the fleet so his answers were within the realm of possibility but he was quite frightened and that made it harder to tell if he was lying. Still, it might not matter-

“I would like you to open one of the pods Dr Garcia.”

“Open-” He began.

“A pod.” She confirmed. “Any of them will do. I assure you the occupant will not immediately try to kill you.”

Unless he was stupid enough to pick her pati but that seemed unlikely.

The doctor took a moment to move and when he did it seemed stilted somehow, as though he thought he might be dreaming. He knelt by the first pod he reached, Ling the elder of the surviving Chinese women, and he paused. 

She wondered if the pods had been tampered with somehow, if the doctor was planning to set off a trap she couldn’t see. He didn’t strike her as the sort of man to injure himself attempting heroics-

His hands were shaking as she watched him key in codes and throw back latches. The pod broke open with a hiss, a rush of cold air. 

Ling gasped. She tried to sit and fell back, spluttering. She coughed and coughed and the doctor sat frozen until she began to choke out words-

“Where-”

“Greenland.” Khan answered. “Three hundred years after we left Earth. In a hostile military base.”

Ling scrubbed a hand over her eyes and muttered something that was both accurate and obscene in Mandarin. 

“A ship, a vyomanaut ship, will be here shortly. I would like everyone out of these pods by then.”

She caught Ling’s gaze and held it for a little too long. Ling nodded and Khan hoped that she knew enough Sanskrit to recognise the word for astronaut. Obviously she had the sense not to trust the doctor or let him out of her sight-

Khan offered her a hand and tugged her to her feet. 

Ling went left, Khan right. 

The first few were easier. The room was quiet, still, the flood of questions manageable and though they were her people the pods were disordered in such a way that the first few were not her closest confidants. Not the Indians she had grown up with, the mixed Arabic band that made up her husband’s kin, her Ethiopian, Israeli and Nigerian allies. It was easier that way, when the face beneath the glass did not make her heart ache quite so much. Easier to focus entirely on the time and the task at hand.

And then someone woke Krishna who promptly demanded to know what sort of mess his Behan had dragged them into now. She heard Rati raise her voice in a flood of particularly expressive Hindi and-

And it occurred to her that if she did not personally open Layla’s pod she would have to waste time explaining that there were now ninety two of them to a roomful of her disorientated kin. And if someone got to her pati first-

She did not particularly relish the thought of informing them all they’d been used to blackmail one of their own while they slept. It would be done best in safety, aboard their ship, preferably after she had had the chance to talk to her pati to establish what- what had been done and how much he wished to be made known. 

She checked her watch, chose to trust her family would leave her husband to her and set about finding her friend. 

As it happened she discovered them together, their pods in the centre and slightly apart. A way to keep better watch on those that had proved resourceful enough to escape perhaps? 

She pushed the thought aside and concentrated on Layla’s pod. The codes, the latches, the hiss of cold air-

Layla did not gasp and cough. She resisted the urge to struggle, to fight her own body and lay still. She made a woman who had once ruled half a continent wait so that when she spoke her voice was steady and clear.

“My children?”

“Are safe.” Khan swore. 

“Where?” 

“Harar.”

“Harar?” Layla echoed with an incredulous snort. “What are you trying to do? Get them eaten by hyenas?”

“If they take after you I suspect they would eat the hyenas.” Khan replied making Layla laugh.

God she had missed that laugh. 

It faded and Khan lingered until Layla sighed and waved her away. 

She checked her watch to reassure herself that Joachim was not running late and moved to the next pod. 

She didn’t hesitate, she didn’t spare the occupant of the pod a glance and if she threw back the latches with more force than was necessary who would know?

She waited until the thing was half open before she looked down at the man in the pod. 

She kept her face impassive as he woke. He stared at her. Blinked, once, twice, as though he couldn’t quite believe it and-

She leaned over and laid a hand against his cheek, bent until their foreheads were almost touching-

For what seemed like an age they stayed there but- but she had to ask

“Why did you try to drive a space ship into a city?”

His hand moved to cover hers-

“I thought you were dead.” He murmured.

She sighed. “Habibi, Guru Amar Das Ji expressedly forbid sati-”

He scowled. “I was not-”

“Truly?”

He looked away. 

She ran her thumb over his cheekbone, watched him carefully for signs but they had trained them to be so….inexpressive in his country. They would have to discuss it, all of it, Marcus and Kirk and Klingons and San Franciso but-

But not now. Not with all the others in earshot and getting livelier by the minute. Not when he had just woken.

“How do you intend to leave?” He enquired.

“Aberash and Joachim are acquiring a ship.”

He turned back to her, a hint of scepticism in his expression. “Can they fly it?”

“Well enough to beam us aboard I believe.”

“They don’t have shielding around-”

“I disabled it.” She interrupted.

“How?” He queried.

“I blew up their power lines. The back up generators are not sufficient to power a shield-”

“You’re sure?” He cut in.

“Which of us is the engineer?”

“Which of us is three hundred years out of date?” He countered.

“I’ve been studying.” She protested which might have produced a hint of a smirk. “Anyway the shield was new and the generators were old. They weren’t designed to produce that level of power.”

“And if they can you’ll have Joachim shell them from orbit?”

“If it becomes necessary.”

He shifted as much as it was possible within the pod.

“Are they all-?” 

“Yes.” She reassured him. “In fact I have some good news. There are now ninety two of us.”

He closed his eyes. “Layla?”

“Who else?”

He smiled and there was more to be said, so much more, but the first dancing strings of light had started to weave around their hands, their faces. She heard panicked voices, Salman’s and Grace’s among them, Layla trying to explain three centuries of technological advance in as many seconds-

Then the light swallowed them and spat them out on a space ship that was already aimed away from Earth, accelerating into the stars.

The stars stretched from diamond points to streaks of silver against black. The word vajra came to mind, the force of thunderbolts and the eternity of diamond, Indra and Achebe’s ‘Arrow of God’-

She heard someone, likely Parvati, murmur that it was beautiful.

It was.

And they were alive.

And they were free.

**Author's Note:**

> Pati- Husband  
> Loh Mushti- A martial art of Punjabi origin. Literally 'iron fist'. One of the most beautiful and brutal arts I've ever seen.  
> Kara- A steel bracelet that Sikhs are required to wear, usually on the dominant hand. An unbroken circle that represents an unbreakable attachment to God.  
> Kesh- Long hair, devote Sikhs are not supposed to cut any of their hair.  
> 'Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison'- Salman Rusdie. Midnight's Children.  
> Purdah- Segregation by sex traditional in some areas of the Middle East and India. I was raised in a country where it is mandatory by law.  
> Harar- A town in Ethiopia famous for the practice of hand-feeding wild hyenas.  
> Krodh- Wrath or rage. One of the 'Five Evils' in Sikhism.  
> Vyomanaut- The offical Indian term for an astronaut, derived from 'vyoma' Sanskrit for sky or space.  
> Behan- Sister. Hindi.  
> Habibi- 'My love'. Arabic.  
> Guru Amar Das Ji- The Third Sikh Guru. The Gurus are the most important figures in Sikhism.  
> Sati- When a widow burns herself alive on her husband's funeral pyre. A practice that has been banned in India several times and is explicitly forbidden in Sikhism.  
> Vajra- Sanskrit for both diamond and thunderbolt. A weapon of several Hindu Gods. Both irresistable force and indestructability. Spiritual firmness and power.


End file.
